Sony BMG Sued For Using Pirated Software 266
An anonymous reader sends us to ZeroPaid, which seems to be the only site in English to have picked up a story out of France involving Sony and piracy. Except this time the shoe is on the other foot. The small software company PointDev learned that Sony BMG was using a pirated license for one of its system administration tools. PointDev got bailiffs to raid a Sony property and they found pirated software on four servers. The source article (link is to a Google translation of French original) quotes PointDev's spokesman claiming that the BSA believes 47% of software used in corporations to be illegal — whether he is referring to Sony in particular is not clear in the translation.
Makes You Wonder (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Makes You Wonder (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, so now they can deny they installed anything and just blame, um, Sony.
Let me be the first to say (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Insightful)
Either pirating other people's work (software, mp3 etc) is right or wrong. If it's right, then why are you laughing at this, according to half of the
Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Insightful)
There is underway currently the greatest transfer of wealth in human history, and it's going from workers to the very rich. Sort of socialism in reverse, and the result will be that the world will become a very unpleasant place in which to live for most of us.
Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Interesting)
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=379451&cid=21579069 [slashdot.org]
The recent era of plebs having the opportunity to better themselves whether in wealth or knowledge, and to live freely at the will of no other but subject to uniform laws that apply equally to all, will be seen in the vast scope human history as a short-lived blip that has more to do with the back-to-back industrial/information revolution than anything else. Disruptive tech has always caused upheaval until the it's subverted and the new order is established; welcome to the new order, same as the old order.
The wealth redistribution is just the system returning to ground state after its recent (in historical scope) excitation.
Not to be judgemental, but... (Score:5, Funny)
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Wait, we get pie AND bongs?
Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Informative)
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Do you have a solution to this problem, other than deciding that certain people need to have their choices made for them, 'for their own good'?
N.B. I am not arguing agains
yes, slashdot comments are sometimes inconsistent (Score:5, Funny)
It almost seems as if they were written by different people.
Re:yes, slashdot comments are sometimes inconsiste (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:4, Insightful)
Their argument regarding intellectual property is one of righteousness. Their hypocrisy reveals that they are merely a revenue maximizing engine attempting to extract as much profit as possible from a set of rules that they choose to pay attention to only when it suits their self-interest.
The larger discussion about morality, legality and license/copyright violations is fairly complex, but my opinion is that that issue is extremely far away from right/wrong or ethical/unethical, and is instead only in the realm of legal/illegal. The act of making an unauthorized copy of a creative work is illegal, but not immoral (IMHO). If you choose to make such a copy, you're assuming the responsibility for the chance that you may be detected and sued by the **AA, but that's about it. Nobody feels bad about it, and quite honestly, I don't think anyone should feel bad.
Sony, on the other hand, has been pursuing severe penalties for the exact same acts that they are also guilty of. So they're not only acting illegally, but they are also immoral because of their hypocrisy.
Ethics, morals and all that jazz. (Score:5, Insightful)
14 years.
Yep, 14 years after publication you were free to copy at your heart content any material and publish it.
Now it is death of copyright holder + 100 years. So for most productive people this translates in copyrights that extend for the best part of 150 years.
This is sick, insane, unethical and immoral.
The outrage is not that people in Slashdot seem more willing to endorse piracy more openly than most other people. The real outrage is that elected representatives everywhere have legislated to the current state of affairs (extending to international conventions), that private companies have corrupted copyright to such an extent, and that there are people like you demanding that others conform to a situation that is clearly not sustainable in a social system that prizes cooperation and inventiveness.
People are not pirating stuff because they are bad or unethical. People are pirating stuff because they know they have been screwed and are not willing to pay homage to the screwers.
Lost in translation... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Lost in translation... (Score:4, Funny)
Inside Sony (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Inside Sony (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Inside Sony (Score:5, Insightful)
That may be true, but it's never the "known knowns" that get you in trouble.
The question for your bosses, on the other hand, is there commercial software about which they have no knowledge that isn't properly licensed? Apparently there is. And that fact reflects badly on the public image of a company, among other things, even if the transgression occurred in someone else's division.
Re:Inside Sony (Score:4, Informative)
Well if they don't know about it, how do you expect them to answer?
Or do you just expect them to check now, and give you an answer later?
As for reflecting on them... Employee behaviour at one sibling company doesn't reflect on the other sibling company, it reflect on the parent, for not disciplining it's "child" companies. This is not just a division, they are seperate companies, with only some owners in common.
Re:Inside Sony (Score:5, Informative)
Legally, they're required to know about everything, even the stuff they don't know about. If they don't know about someone installing an illicit copy of MS Office on their work laptop, and that person is caught, they're certainly likely to fire the employee, but that doesn't stop them from being liable. Ask all the companies that the BSA's raided over the years.
Re:Inside Sony (Score:5, Interesting)
I looked at it rather suspiciously and asked her for the license documentation. She handed me a hand written license key on note paper.
I asked her where she got the CD and I gave this guy a call. He was a tech at the corporate offices on the left coast. I asked him about it and asked how many licenses we had. (I was thinking they might have a corporate license and just needed to know who had the app installed)
He replied that the company had 5 licenses. I asked him how many systems it was installed on. "Umm 50 here I think."
Yeah, right. I reminded him that it was not a good idea to install apps without a license. He agreed, but was ordered to do it by the head of the department that uses this thing.
(Management by threat is the standard with this company)
Knowing where this was going I thanked him, told my supervisor, (Who almost had kittens when I filled him in), broke the CD in front of him and another witness and then told the user that the app wasn't going on her system.
Moving forward, I have second hand information that this problem was reported up the line twice to the VP who managed my org. I personally told him that we had at least 35 illegal copies, (installed by the users themselves when we refused to do it), and that considering the numbers of DBA's and developers in the company, we might be out of compliance to the tune of 1-2 million dollars.
His exact words were:
"I don't want to hear about this. If I hear about this officially, then I'll have to do something about it."
This bozo was dumb enough to say that to me in front of witnesses.
My local group continued refusing to install this thing and kept extensive documentation, (CYA type), regarding this.
Shortly before I left a panicked data call from the CIO came down asking for the number of installs at our site. I had the number of course, but I like to think that someone blew the whistle on them.
Shortly after I left, both the VP I reported to and the CIO either wanted to "Spend more time with their families, or seek new alternatives elsewhere".
Re:Inside Sony (Score:5, Insightful)
Depending on the exact definition of "commercial software" you happen to be be using then you could be "pirating" quite a bit of software. Just because software is not "commercial" does not mean that it is exempt from copyright.
Re:Inside Sony (Score:5, Informative)
I can count on one finger the organizations I've worked for where shareware tools like WinZip were actually properly licensed. At one shop I worked at, I actually had the CFO (who also functioned as the CIO/CTO) say, in these exact words, "oh, nobody actually enforces that WinZip license.. you think the BSA is gonna come in here and bust our nuts over 100 unlicensed copies of WinZip? Get real!".
Three months after I left this company, the BSA came in, did a "software audit", and indeed busted their nuts over 100 unlicensed copies of WinZip (along with other licensing violations).
Re:Inside Sony (Score:5, Funny)
So what did you spend your reward money on?
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Re:Inside Sony (Score:5, Insightful)
So, it was probably just a "rogue admin", maybe it was easier to get it pirated than to go through the proper channels, or maybe it was deemed too expensive for what it was offering. In any case it was willful infrigement and I think Sony BMG should pay 150.000 x the price of the software for each violation. Note that the number is not selected randomly - it is the equivalent of the cases where Sony BMG is suing.
I should note that the software in question even offered a 30-day evaluation.
AC posting (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:AC posting (Score:4, Insightful)
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Whattya wanna bet that your company is in violation of one or more of the EULAs for the products you use?
The licenses are designed to ensure that this is the case.
.
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I'm getting more and more the idea EULAs and copyright law altogether are created in such a way to ensure you can find something if you wanted to. I'm even willing to accept that in this case, the responsible admin thought everything is properly licensed, and that it was an oversight, not deliberate piracy, as in so many cases where the BSA crashed into a company and pulled them into the spotlight for piracy, copyright infringment and other, simila
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In other words, you can't avoid a BSA audit by posting here.
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Software licensing is like that statement "give me 6 lines from an honest man...", The one-sided structure of most EULA's makes them nearly impossible to be 100% legal in the real world.
Let's say you have a backup server cluster/SAN.. technically that software may be considered "pirated" because it's on the PC running it, and 2 backup servers that "could" run it, as well as any PC
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Why it does not happen more often? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am surprised that this does not occur more than it does in large businesses like Sony, the scale of the company increases the number of opportunities for this to occur. Also there are more people that have guilty knowledge that something like this occurred. It would only take one of these people to become disgruntled and rat out their employer( for a finder's fee of course).
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Re:Why it does not happen more often? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Why it does not happen more often? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why it does not happen more often? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nope. I read the original french article, not the translation, and the employee called tech support for help, not knowing that the license key was pirated. PointDev didn't have them in their customer database, tracked down the key, then got a bailiff to seize the servers i
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Of course a businesses should not be under such uncertainty. I mean, in the US the congress is constantly trying to halt the uncertainty that consumer liti
Only 'haha'? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Only 'haha'? (Score:5, Funny)
But only if you believe that Sony BMG was intelligently designed.
What will they charge per pirated copy? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What will they charge per pirated copy? (Score:5, Interesting)
That makes no sense. In P2P situations, the idea is that the person has shared each song with lots of people who would otherwise have bought it. Nobody is accusing Sony of putting this software on a P2P network, so where would the idea of "theoretical lost sales" come from? The number of lost sales is known, it's the number of installations Sony were using.
I'm all for holding Sony to their own standards, but let's not just invent crazy behaviour and pretend it's the same thing.
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Nobody is accusing Sony of putting this software on a P2P network, so where would the idea of "theoretical lost sales" come from?
Sony BMG did even worse: they probably put it on a hacker "darknet" (read: internal fileserver). Since those are explicitly designed to distribute unauthorized copies of software clandestinely, they obviously must have served at least 1,000 copies for each unauthorized installation that was found.
Hanging isn't good enough. Hanging isn't good enough for the thieves.
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Internal corporate fileservers are not explicitly designed to do any such thing.
Again, that makes no sense. Sony were raided. They know exactly how many unauthorised installations there were.
I know
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Internal corporate fileservers are not explicitly designed to do any such thing.
Next time I'll open with a <sarcasm> tag. Yes, those arguments are similar to what Sony BMG used against citizens via their RIAA subsidiary. Buy a new computer? Must've been hiding evidence! Hard drive seizes and needs to be replaced? Must've been hiding evidence! Don't own a computer? Must've been hiding evidence! Have files in inadvertently shared folders? Obviously must have distributed them at least 100 times.
I claim full right to be endlessly amused at the ironic comeuppance speeding
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Did you sell your account or something? Again, I repeat: I exert my right to enjoy this and make wild-ass exaggerations in the vein they've been making via their proxy, the RIAA. For their sake, I hope the plaintiff's lawyers aren't the pathological liars that Sony BMG's own have been shown to be.
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Even if you include all the people who used the software, this is a known number. There is no speculation on the number of lost sales necessary. The analogy to sharing with the world via a P2P network is plain wrong.
Re:What will they charge per pirated copy? (Score:4, Insightful)
As to what a 92,000% markup has to do with anything, who knows. You're off by a factor of ten based on the amount in one example case, but moreover, it's not a markup, because it's not based on a retail price.
Obviously... (Score:4, Funny)
Copyvio happen all the time... (Score:5, Interesting)
Some cynical emails by me later and they eventually removed the content (they properly didn't want to include the GFDL into their propaganda material, as it would be quite contrary to all the pro-copyright stuff). This shows us: even those who try to make us believe copyright is important don't really care much about it when _they_ want to copy something.
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It isn't exactly unexpected, the MPAA having been caught as both movie and software pirates, it might be better to assume that all the major music and movie companies respect nobody's copyrights other than their own.
This is also the same company which got caught putting computer malware on disks they were passing off as music CDs.
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Just a sidenote: copyright is important for GFDL and GPL as well. Without copyright law, GPL'd code becomes essentially BSD-licensed one, if not public domain.
Your point gets made a lot around here. But it doesn't take into account the bigger picture.
Stallman's goal is that the market for software will eventually get to a point a lot like where the automotive market is today. Software without source code is like a car with the engine compartment welded shut. No one would buy a car like that because it is a basic expectation that anyone should be able to open up their car and work on their engine -- even if 99% of car owners never do and just let a mechanic ta
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47% is global, not for Sony (Score:5, Informative)
I'm french so I can provide a more accurate translation:
According to the Business Software Alliance, an organization representing the major software companies, 47% of the software used by businesses in France is used illegally.
So 47% is the global number for french businesses, not limited to Sony.
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http://news.zdnet.co.uk/leader/0,1000002982,39205464,00.htm [zdnet.co.uk]
'Unless the BSA gets its act together and replaces overstated and misconstrued data with properly researched and carefully presented facts, it will become known as an arrogant organ of propaganda.'
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Bad summary (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bad summary (Score:4, Insightful)
The 47% figure (Score:3, Informative)
I still wonder... (Score:5, Informative)
It's good to see Sony pay though. I hope this gets mainstream news coverage - I really can't stand those Hippocr... ah, excuse me, my choleric side is breaking through again...
Sue the bastards!
"Pirated" can mean many things (Score:2, Insightful)
First, it may mean the corporation just doesn't have the documentation that verifies they legally own the software they bought. Microsoft is famous for shaking down corporations that have either misplaced or misdocumented licenses in order to force them to buy again or upgrade software.
Also, this likely includes various "non-commercial use only" freeware. Software like Toad, which you can use for free at home, but at work you have to pay to use. I a
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Actually it is perfectly possible to "pirate" open source software. However the risk tends to be exclusivly on the party distributing it. So long as you arn't distributing the software then there isn't an issue, even if whoever you got it from didn't do everything they should.
The legal traps these corporations put into their proprietary products is burdensome. To go through procurement for eve
Use the RIAA's math to figure damages (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony needs to put up or shut up.
Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
Ironically, auditing software tends to have the most obscure licensing terms and is frequently next to useless anyway - either because it only goes by what's in the registry for "Add/Remove Programs" (so some dodgy copy of an application which was hacked around and no longer appears in "Add/Remove Programs" won't be caught) or it just gives you a list of every
It is for all practical purposes impossible to put hand-on-heart and say "I can guarantee that we're not using a single piece of pirated software" in any significantly sized business today. About the best you can do is say "I'm pretty sure we're not, however if you can provide evidence that I'm wrong I will be happy to look at resolving the issue - either by using an alternative product or buying whatever it is that we're missing".
I would gladly migrate the entire enterprise over to Free (either speech or beer) software tomorrow for every single business need - it would eliminate that worry at a stroke - but this is the real world and half-decent Free accounting and payroll applications are pretty thin on the ground.
My guess is that someone less than honest installed the application in the past with a pirated key and left the company. Their successor ran into trouble with the application and did the sensible thing - called the vendor.
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Not every piece of software has a license as clear-cut as "One copy per PC".
You'd think more people here on /. would know that. Look at the Visual Studio license:
You can have one copy installed on a desktop.
You can have another copy installed on a mobile machine, iff it's used by the same developer when their away from their desk (on travel).
You can have a copy installed on a third machine, for testing and debugging.
We recently got into this discussion with our IT guys over an audit. I have a copy installed at my desk. I have a copy installed on my test machine, which i
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Ernie Ball Co. [infoworld.com] had no problems figuring that out after getting stung by a $90,000 BSA audit.
It's all a matter of business priorities. If a small-to-medium-sized guitar string manufacturer can do it, I suspect most shops
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Ernie Ball Co. had no problems figuring that out after getting stung by a $90,000 BSA audit.
Firstly, that's really getting old. Is there seriously no more recent example?
Secondly, Ernie Ball did have a problem figuring it out. Right at the end of the article there's a paragraph that I think you may have missed:
The company still runs its critical business applications on a Unix server using an accounting package from The SCO Group, formerly Caldera International. A future project will involve moving that system over to Linux, Whitmore said.
No mention as to whether or not they eventually migrated it, let alone what they migrated to.
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The weird part was that it was http://www.laprovence.com/articles/2008/03/19/347901-UNKNOWN-Une-societe-vauclusienne-attaque-le-geant-Sony.php [laprovence.com] rather obvious it was cracked - there was a keygen used (search the net for "TAM/CORE" for more info) and most of the time, people who install cracked software leave the keygen somewhere on the machine "just in case".
This is one of the risks that you run into when your business is dependent on closed-source, proprietary software - more specifically, in this case,
If you steal software, don't call the support (Score:3, Informative)
"PointDev noticed that Sony was unlawfully using "Ideal Migration" only after receiving support inquiries from one of Sony's employees."
Everyone is guilty (Score:3, Insightful)
the BSA believes 47% of software used in corporations to be illegal
I believe that's referring to companies in France but, in my experience, I've never been in an enterprise that would survive a 100% audit and not find something out of spec in its license.
To me that's one of the best reasons to run F/OSS. Which makes it ironic that MSFT claims using F/OSS is a liability. Well, how does that liability compare to the near guarantee of of a big fine in the event of a BSA audit?
Perhaps someone with more legal background could answer the question of if you're not running any proprietary software, if BSA would be able to claim grounds for an audit? The obvious answer is no....but how would you prove you don't have any BSA covered software on your system? Or do you need to? I'm not at all clear how that process works. Maybe I should call myself into their hotline and see how they handle it.
Isn't BSA taking a hint from RIAA? (Score:2)
Sorta a self proclaimed police body.
47% of *French* companies (Score:2, Informative)
Nothing new under the sun (Score:5, Interesting)
This fight isn't about the right or wrong of copyright, it never has been. It's about a bunch of folks fighting to protect their livelihoods. This is a perfectly natural thing for them to do and something we all understand. Unsurprisingly the folks fighting the hardest are the folks whose positions are becoming superfluous under the new system. I could even forgive them, except most of the current batch of record/movie execs have never been anything but scum sucking parasites as their positions have been tecnically superfluous since before they got them.
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rj
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And when the RIAA/Sony/whoever comes to prosecute you for filesharing, they really care that it's just your 15 year old son sharing a torrent against your permission.
Maybe they need to check their code a bit better?
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So? If one's kid is downloading music illegally at home, in "complete violation" of the family's policy, does that protect the parents from the various industry groups that might press lawsuits?
The question here is who or what is a legal entity. A family is not a legal entity, but each family member is its own, separate legal entity, and a company like Sony is its own separate legal entity. Just like you are responsible for any action of any of your body parts, so is Sony responsible for the actions of each of its employees.
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I don't know what the "translation" says, but the original french article makes the point that the keys were generated at the time of the merger of the 2 companies, when they would need to migrate data from one server to another. It wasn't "casual". that's why the company is saying they're not interested in "working out a settlement" - they want a judgme